Posts tagged ‘Abbott Government’

At the Council meeting on 9th September Moreland Council voted on a motion of Cr Sue Bolton’s to endorse the Peoples climate March on the weekend Friday 27 November to Sunday 29 November 2015.

Event organisers have called for wide community endorsement of this rally to send a strong message to leaders and diplomats gathering in Paris at the United Nations climate conference. Marches and rallies are being planned for this weekend around the world.

Kelvin Thomson, Moreland’s Federal MP for the seat of Wills in the House of Representatives, rebuked the Abbott Government for the low climate targets that were announced on 11 August 2015.

Kelvin wrote on his blog on 13 August:

The Liberal Government’s announcement that it plans to reduce greenhouse emissions by 26-28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 falls a long way short of what is needed to effectively tackle extreme weather events.

Its claim to be comparable with the United States is utterly misleading. The US plan is indeed for 26-28 per cent reductions, but by 2025, not 2030. How on earth can we claim to be going as fast as the United States when it will take us 5 years longer to get there?

Moreover the Liberal target is way short of the recommendation of Australia’s Climate Change Authority. The Climate Change Authority was charged with taking into account not only climate science and current and future climate change impacts, it was also tasked with examining what other countries are doing, and the economic and social impacts of climate action. Its investigation was comprehensive and its recommendations deserve to be treated with the utmost seriousness.

No surprises in the Warburton Review recommendations published this week. The review panel was after all hand picked to return a result the conservative and ideologically driven Abbott Government would be happy with.

Chaired by self confessed climate denier and former chairman of Caltex Dick Warburton, the recommendations involve changing the target by either closing the scheme to new investors or by setting targets based on the growth of electricity demand. The review also called for the outright abolition of the small-scale RET scheme – the scheme that assists solar PV panels installation on domestic houses and small businesses. This change would push up the cost of panels by 50 per cent according to a Sydney Morning Herald Report.

The review was very narrow in focus and did not consider adequately the climate science imperative for rapid climate change action and need to rapidly transition to renewables in stationary energy, and the need to do this as part of the global uptake in renewables, and nor did it assess or model the substantial health benefits and reduced medical costs provided of reduced air pollution.